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Harbison writes in a complex yet easily approachable idiom that represents a bridge between postwar formalism and the new conservatism of the past decade. As a young man in the '60s, he was strongly influenced by a pervasive emphasis on form. Music was supposed to be highly organized. "Gestures," "events" and "new sounds," to use the jargon of the period, preoccupied composers as they sought new ways of structuring pieces—often forgetting that music should appeal to more than the intellect. Harbison struggled to combine innovative musical architecture with his lifelong love of melody.
"It took me a long time to reconcile what I felt with the general climate of the times," he says. "But it wasn't a bad thing because it forced me to think. As a composer, I've become more concerned now with melody, but I'm also very interested in what I call questions of large design, the sequence of the way things happen in a piece. The sense of new discourse is very important. Composers who go dry do so because they repeat their forms, not because they repeat their melodic or harmonic idiosyncrasies."
Harbison considers himself first of all a composer of operas, and he is contemplating a new one. "I have been gravitating toward pieces that require refining of my operatic skills," he notes. "I've been choosing, perhaps subconsciously, to write things that contain some sense of a protagonist, things that are overtly dramatic." Concertos, as Mozart proved, are one way to do this, and song cycles another.
In his embrace of opera, Harbison has rediscovered the primacy of the human voice. Not that he wants to write like Verdi. "I'm not nostalgic for tonality," he says. "It is one of the easiest ways of getting a response from an audience, and I'm not terribly interested in it. But you have to let the voice expand. The voice is what holds the listener in the theater."
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The adventurous Santa Fe Opera is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a season that includes such rarities as Paul Hindemith's News of the Day, Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress and Richard Strauss's Daphne. But, a few individual performances aside, it has been a dry operatic summer in the Southwest.